The Everyday Tactician campaign is relevant for Creative Data because it used data from a game to help a real football team. Xbox promoted launch of Football Manager 2024 with a first-of-its-kind activation to put a gamer into a real football club. Football Manager is the world’s most advanced football simulator. Some gamers spend thousands of hours playing it. Xbox offered them the opportunity to use those skills in a real job in the football. One gamer was hired and used simulated game data and skills from his in-game experience to help Bromley FC achieve their best season ever.

In the UK, football is the most popular national sport. It has an almost religious following with fans constantly playing, discussing, arguing and dreaming about the game. Bromley FC are in the National League which is a highly competitive league but without the big budgets of the Premier League.

National League sides struggle to hire top talent as bigger, richer Premier League clubs hire the best. Top-tier football is currently being transformed by the increased use of data to win games, with teams of tacticians who use data to inform tactical decisions. But lower league teams are struggling to innovate.

Football Manager is an award-winning football simulation game series that started in 1982. It’s the world’s most advanced football simulator, using real world football data collected by over 2000 scouts across every football league. The game gives you an unprecedented suite of data that only top managers would have access to, helping gamers analyse everything from XG (expected goals) to historical data going back 20 years. In FM you play as a manager and control tactics rather than controlling the players actions directly as in FIFA.

Xbox champions the power of gaming under their current tagline ‘Power Your Dreams’ and in this case they were able to power gamers’ dreams to work in pro football and Bromley FC’s dream to challenge for promotion.

Football Manager 24 (FM24) launched in November 2023. The game is historically a PC game but console is now the fastest growing platform, so Xbox is in a race to establish themselves as the first choice for gamers, rather than their competitor PlayStation. Xbox is the brand which “Powers your Dreams” so they wanted to empower gamers to unlock the full potential of their football dreams. Xbox Game Pass is Xbox’s subscription service – a ‘Netflix for games’ – that gives players access to 100’s of games for a monthly price. The brief was to make Football Manager fans see Xbox Game Pass as the best place to play. The objectives were to increase the number of Xbox players of FM24 compared to FM23 and to increase Xbox’s brand association with football.

For the launch of FM24 on Xbox Game Pass, Xbox showed the power of gaming. They partnered with Bromley Football Club to announce a job as a football tactician. The only way to apply was through FM24 on Xbox. Nathan Owolabi, a Football Manager fanatic and Wembley Stadium tour guide, secured the job. The project explored the similarities and differences between the real and virtual worlds as Nathan became embedded in the team, some of whom initially doubted his gaming credentials. Nathan brought his skills and experience from the game to the team’s backroom working on data-based team selection, opponent analysis and tactics, simulating over 230 games over 5 seasons. His work helped the club secure their best league performance in their 130-year history, proving that a gamer can change the game of football.

This was not a traditional data driven campaign. The Everyday Tactician was put into the job on his own and had to use his own data skills to help the team. Nathan Owolabi was tasked with assisting the team using data from Football Manager in conjunction with data from the professional software Wyscout. He interpreted it in his reports which were delivered weekly to the manager, in addition to backroom staff meetings and analysing training sessions and giving team briefings. This data would be the key competitive advantage that Bromley would have over their competition.

Over the season at Bromley, Nathan used data from 230 simulated games combined with the tactical team’s first-hand data collection and observation. Nathan briefed the team using insights from the game to help them explore new tactical ideas and insights, for example the power of long throw-ins to overcome opponents’ defences. We also worked with Nathan to produce data insight posters which went into Bromley’s matchday programmes, bringing fans behind the scenes of The Everyday Tactician’s analysis. The team’s performance was impressive, particularly in defence where they had the fewest defeats in the league and the second most clean sheets (where no goals are conceded in a game.)

- 190% increase in Xbox gamers on FM24 compared to FM23

- 1.5 billion total campaign impressions

- 1.2 million people saw the job advertisement

- It was the most played Football Manager game ever

- Bromley FC had their highest league position, highest points tally and fewest defeats

- Most successful season in Bromley FC’s 130-year history.